


Like rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong

by BeautifulLife



Category: Grease (1978), Grease - All Media Types
Genre: 1970s, 1974, Future, Future Fic, Gen, but not entirely depressing, characters grown up, depressing in parts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 18:46:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 540
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17229251
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeautifulLife/pseuds/BeautifulLife
Summary: It's 1974, and the Pink Ladies have grown up.





	Like rama lama lama ka dinga da dinga dong

When true love dies in 1974, Sandra Zuko has a thirteen-year-old, an eleven-year-old, a pack-a-day habit, and no education beyond high school. She gets a job as a cocktail waitress at a place along the old highway, miles from anywhere Danny takes his new wife.

Late at night, she watches old movies on a UHF station that doesn’t run ads for Zuko’s Bargain Cars, wondering when a boring man in a gray flannel suit will become enthralled by her.

 

Frenchie is the top Avon saleswoman for Southern California, five years in a row.

When everyone expects that the “natural look” will do her in, she invents a process that involves four contours, two highlighters, and a special quiz for determining if women should use pinkish or peachish shades.

She lives in a Tudor-style house, surrounded by peach roses, with a young blonde that she refers to as “my muse.”

 

A week after she got the letter that Kineckie died in Viet Nam, Rizzo sold their thrift store furniture, packed three suitcases in the back of Greased Lightnin’, and drove east. Some say she has a kid in Oklahoma, some say she’s singing back-up in Nashville. Truth is that she drove all the way to Massachusetts, put herself through college, kept up her grades despite the distractions of protesting a war she can’t forgive for happening, and got a recommendation to go to grad school.

Dr. Elizabeth Kineckie now teaches American History at the University of Wisconsin and is working on a book about protest movements. If she gets tenure, there’s an engineering professor who’d love to marry her and doesn’t care that she won’t change her name. Their kids will be hyphenated and not allowed to get into half the trouble Rizzo did.

 

It’s Marty who’s singing back-up in Nashville. She’s had three different record labels and three different flops, because while she looks great on the album covers, whatever’s special about her is mostly in the minds of the label execs who sign her.

The next label exec or country singer who puts the moves on her is going to be putting a ring on her finger, she’s decided. She isn’t really seeing fine lines _yet_ —not unless the light is really bright, and Frenchie has recommended a full skincare regime to take care of these things—but she wants a home and kids, not an endless life on the road, playing to half-filled clubs in Podunk, Texas.

 

Jan doesn’t care if she peaked in high school. Putzie makes a good living as a plumber. They’ve got a nice house in San Fernando Valley, three kids who aren’t more trouble than kids are supposed to be, two cars, and a little nest egg for vacations when the kids are old enough to leave for a few days. (Until then, it’s Disneyland every summer.)

She’s head of the PTA, loves her book club, has some ideas for planting the flower beds next year, and is even learning a new language so she’ll be ready for that eventual summer vacation. When Putzie asks about the pothooks in her language books, she smiles and says: “Greece is the time, is the place, is the moment. Greece is the way that I’m feeling.”

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The Sandy one wrote itself, mostly as a result of my watching too much film noir on a visit to my parents, and then everyone else needed a story.


End file.
